


Phoenix

by superfluouskeys



Category: Wentworth (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Gen, Jealousy, Power Dynamics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 06:56:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15625203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superfluouskeys/pseuds/superfluouskeys
Summary: Meg doesn't think Will is a bad governor.  Rather, he is a nothing.  He likes to sit on fences, to convince himself that not taking sides is somehow morally superior.  He defers to Meg and then pretends that he's made up his own mind.  Meg tries not to dwell on how it sickens her.





	Phoenix

Vera Bennett has not slept.

It takes more concentration than she possesses to comb her hair into a bun, more time than she has to spare adjusting her uniform in the mirror and patting at the dark circles under her eyes, and still she is well aware she looks distinctly disheveled.

She should have slept.  Work is a special kind of hell when she doesn't sleep, but she was nervous, terrified, actually, and all she could see when she closed her eyes was that new prisoner screaming and writhing on the floor, and her mother was in rare form until her meds finally kicked in, and Vera held the bottle in her own hand far too long, but she has seen what the prisoners are like and she has seen what her coworkers are like and she has seen what her own family is like, and she will not depend on anything, not now.

Especially not now.

And if that means she doesn't sleep, then, so be it.

The fluorescent lighting is brutal.  Vera grasps her coffee cup with both hands as though to steady herself while she tries very hard to release the tension in her shoulders, to precious little avail.

"Morning."

Panic floods Vera's veins like ice, or lightning, and she clutches her coffee tighter to avoid startling noticeably.  "Good morning," she says, and just barely stutters on the _g_.

"You're jumpy."  Linda Miles always looks like she's got a secret.  She's also a shameless gossip, so she probably does.

"Sorry," Vera tries to smile.  "Didn't sleep much.  Have you seen the new prisoner, Smith, with the—" she gestures to her hair.

Linda chuckles.  "Oh, yeah, heard she put up a fight last night."

Vera frowns, shakes her head.  "She was just overwhelmed, that's all."

"Whatever," says Linda.  "Anyway, she was still out cold when I clocked in.  You want me to go wake her up?"

"No, no, that's fine, I'll do it," says Vera.

"Suit yourself.  Oh, almost forgot, Governor wanted to see you as soon as you got here."

Vera almost chokes on her coffee.  "Right.  Thanks."

She forces herself to sit in the staff room until the coffee affords her at least the momentary illusion of focus, and then to go and rouse Bea Smith before she checks in with the Governor.  Better to walk Smith through the basics before mealtime, or before she forgets she's promised to do it. 

Perhaps she should have entrusted the matter to Linda, but setting aside the fact that Linda's sense of tact comes and goes by days, the image of the new prisoner writhing and screaming on the floor the previous evening has haunted Vera all night, and she is hoping it will set her mind at ease to see to Smith's orientation personally.

Once she's walked Smith to her cell, Vera gathers a few files on which she expects the Governor will want an update, not least because it gives her something to do with her hands, and then knocks on the Governor's door.

"Come in," spoken strangely, as though with a smile, and Vera opens the door to Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, too close, not quite breaking apart.

"Oh, oh, sorry, I'll—I'll just—"

"No, that's okay, Vera; Meg was just leaving."

When Meg turns away from her husband, something about her smile suddenly rings wrong, but she nods pleasantly to Vera as she exits.  Vera stands all but frozen, overly focused on Meg's exit, on the discomfort of seeing the two of them together, and yet again wishing vehemently that she had managed to catch even an hour of sleep.

"Vera?"

"Hm.  Yes."  Vera thrusts one of the files she's brought with her into his hands.  "The file on Williams, the one who, uh..."

"Pissed herself."

Vera averts her eyes.  "Well."

"And?" Mr. Jackson presses.

"Oh.  Uh.  Crystal meth."

"Huh.  That's what Meg thought."

"It's a new one for Franky."

Mr. Jackson lets out a sound like a mirthless chuckle.  "You think Doyle is involved, too?"

Vera looks up nervously, sure she's misspoken.  "Well, who else, for starters?  And anyway, Williams was Franky's cellmate the last time she was inside."

Mr. Jackson sighs thoughtfully.  "It does add up," he says, almost reluctantly.

Vera watches him carefully, wonders whether she'd be able to read the situation better if she weren't so exhausted.

Mr. Jackson's gaze settles on her as though he's just remembered he's speaking to another person.  "Meg thinks we need to come down hard on it.  Smoke her out, you know."

Well, Meg isn't the governor, Vera almost snaps without thinking, but the surge of envy for the power Meg still wields sticks in the back of her throat, and she cannot quite swallow it down.  Meg isn't the governor, Meg isn't even the deputy governor, Vera is, and yet instead of asking Vera what she thinks, he asks—

"And..." Vera says carefully, "what do you think?"

Mr. Jackson sighs again.  "She has a point.  Franky's a tough customer."

"But she's not going to get her own hands dirty," says Vera, all in a rush, before she loses her nerve.  "She'll find someone else to bring the drugs in.  She'll pick on someone new, or she'll get her girlfriend to—"

"Oh, come on, I think she really likes Kim."

If Vera were a different sort of person, she might have laughed.  "Franky doesn't 'really like' anyone.  She uses people to get what she wants."

Mr. Jackson nods thoughtfully.  "That's what Meg said."

Vera closes her eyes and takes a long, deep breath to avoid screaming.  "Right.  Well.  Was there anything else?"

"Uh, yeah, call a staff meeting after lunch, please."

Vera opens her eyes.  "Yes, Governor."

* * *

Meg Jackson did not sleep last night.

Maybe it's all this fuss Will's been making about her health.  It's making her crazy, and she doesn't know how to tell him to stop.  She knows it's coming from a good place, but if she has to keep hearing about what the doc says, having drinks grabbed—or worse, just gently shamed out of her hand, and being put on such obviously light shifts that the rest of the staff are ready to come for her ass, she is absolutely going to lose her mind.  Meg has never been a smoker, but she is considering taking it up just to spite Will and his god-forsaken health shit.

And God forbid she complain!  Will wants a baby, Will doesn't want Meg to "have" to work at all, like this job doesn't mean everything to her, like they haven't both worked their asses off to get here, and now Will has the good job and so Meg's work is trash and she should just give it up.

She leans her forehead against the concrete wall of the staff room.  She knows it isn't like that.  She _knows_.  But damned if it doesn't feel that way sometimes.

She distracts herself by laying into Franky Doyle when she arrives for lunch duty.  There's a staff meeting after lunch, and she's hoping to convince Will to come down hard on the drug problem before it gets out of hand.  If Franky knows now that her supply chain is fucked, she might make a mistake, panic and cotton onto the wrong person to smuggle for her.

Not like Will seems to give a flying fuck, as though the whole problem won't come crashing down on his head if the shit hits the fan, and where will his good fucking job and his plan to play breadwinner be then?

But Meg sees the way Franky eyes the new inmate when she thinks Meg has turned her back, and this provides her with the burst of energy she needs to get through the aimless staff meeting so she can talk to her husband in private.

It's not that she thinks Will is a bad governor, not precisely.  It's just that she thinks his attention is focused elsewhere, and she wonders at his reasoning for taking the job in the first place.  If Will is so desperate for a family, if his head is so full of what the doctor ordered and what Meg ought to be doing with her body, then why apply for the governorship?  Why not let Meg, who was by all accounts more qualified, have the job she actually wants so he can tend to his baby fever in peace?

She'd never thought of Will as someone who was particularly attached to antiquated notions of gender roles, but then perhaps a lot of people are, in a way, aren't they?

Will is not a bad governor.  He is a nothing.  A nonentity.  He likes to sit on fences, to convince himself that not taking sides is somehow morally superior, that if he is evasive and noncommittal enough, things will just sort themselves out.

He asks the staff what they think he should do.  He defers to Meg and then pretends that he's made up his own mind.

Meg tries not to dwell on how it sickens her.

"That Erica, she really pisses me off," says Meg when the staff meeting has adjourned at last.  "I mean, she's not even an officer—she shouldn't be in these meetings!"

"Come here," says Will, with open arms, though "Can't argue with the department, okay?" is hardly soothing.  "You have got to relax," he continues, unhelpfully.  "Remember, the doc said stress is not—"

"Oh, honey, let's not about this right now, please?" Meg tries.

But it's like it eggs him on.  "We can talk about it tonight," he says, low and rich, "making love, making babies..."

"God, can you just....just stop with this?" Meg pushes him away, cannot find it in her to swallow the rage that surges through her.  "You're driving me mad, Will, I mean what was that meeting?  What was the point of that?  This drug problem is gonna get worse if you don't stamp it out fast, I mean—!"  She gestures vaguely.  "Crystal meth?  Moves fast.  And it fucks everyone, I mean, you try being on the ward when they're off their face on that shit!"

"Easy, take it easy—" says Will, with hands outstretched, meant to placate.

"Take it easy!" Meg echoes incredulously.  "You want me to take it easy when you're not doing anything?"

"Fine, all right!"  Simpering.  Spineless.  He's even got the big puppy-dog eyes.  "What do you want me to do?"

Meg tries very hard to feel relieved.  Grateful, even.  "There's a...the new girl, on remand, Smith, with the—" she gestures to her hair.  "I saw Doyle eyeing her in the cafeteria.  I think she's gonna try to get her to traffic for her.  Keep an eye on her."

"Okay," Will nods.  "I'll do that.  You?  Take a break.  Make yourself a cuppa."

He tries to reach for her.  She turns away.  "Yeah.  Sure."

"Hey."  He catches her arm and pulls her back in for a kiss.  She hates the way it turns her stomach.

The next day, when she is leaning over Will's shoulder to see the security cams, she watches the new inmate, Bea Smith, allowing herself to be kissed by a stranger.  She tries not to wonder why it feels the same.

"So, she has a bit on the side," Will remarks. 

Meg does her best not to loathe him for his stupidity.  "She did not know that man," she says, as calmly as she can manage.

"You sure?  I mean—"

"Excuse me," Meg mutters as she storms out.

"Meg!"

She locates Vera and Smith in the courtyard and demands a more thorough search.  She can see the tension written all over Vera's face, is unsurprised when Vera starts stammering out some kind of accusation as soon as they're out of earshot.

"—just really don't think it's appropriate that you're influencing Mr. Jackson, you know, i mean, I know it must—must be hard when—but look, you—you didn't see Smith last night, I mean, she was completely overwhelmed, and if you'd just—"

Meg squeezes her eyes closed and curls her fingers into a fist around the handcuffs she's collected.  "Look.  Listen.  Vera.  If you want to take out some time and write up a speech?  You can tell me how much you hate me later.  Right now, I need you to come with me to the bathroom."

Vera often gives the impression of a frightened animal, cute but possibly rabid.  "What?"

Meg pauses long enough to jerk her head in the direction she is walking.

"But—but you didn't—" Vera begins, but she is following, and that is what matters.

"Find anything?" Meg finishes flatly.

"Well, but, I mean—"

"Shh!"

Sure enough, no sooner do they round the corner than the telltale sounds of gagging ring through the illustrious halls of Wentworth.

"Oh my god," Vera breathes.

And that, Meg cannot help but to think as she catches Bea Smith red-handed with the drugs she has no doubt smuggled in for Franky Doyle, is why she ought to be governor.

* * *

What little sleep Vera manages, she owes to sheer exhaustion.  Still, her slumber is far from restful.  Now, in addition to Bea Smith, screaming and writhing on the floor, in addition to the usual and expected manifestations of her mother's manifold criticisms of her general person and demeanour, in addition to Meg Jackson's intimation that she cannot do her job, she she cannot stop herself from seeing Meg and her husband too close, smiling, lips almost touching, and then Meg, turning away, smile turning suddenly stale.

She doesn't know why it bothers her.  They're married.  It's natural.  And it's not as though Vera is—but Vera has never, not in a long time, at least, and never like that, never happy, always—

The sound of her alarm actually physically hurts, somewhere behind her eyes.

She used to like early mornings, the stillness before the world awoke.  At Wentworth, the world never quite makes it to sleep, and that has stolen some of the magic of mornings from her over the years.  Still, even though the shadows of her dreams haunt her every time she closes her eyes, she doesn't feel quite so near to death's door as she did yesterday.

Just as well.  Days with a lot of visitors can be harrowing in ways one might never expect.

Her hands sweat relentlessly in latex gloves.  She focuses her attention on that and not on the inherent discomfort of strip searches.

"Does this turn you on, Miss Bennett?" one of the prisoners croons as she hands over her underwear.  "Always wondered why a woman would do a job like this."

"That's enough," says Vera through clenched teeth.  "Hair, please."  She is very glad that she does not stutter.

Will wants to let Jacs Holt out of isolation.  Or, Vera should say, Meg wants to let Jacs out of isolation, because Meg thinks she can beat the prisoners at their own mind games.  Meg is upset with her husband because he is the governor and she isn't even the deputy governor, because that is Vera, and Meg wants to call the shots.

Well, Meg can go fuck herself. She is playing a game she can't win, and it is going to end badly.

* * *

Smith doesn't talk.  Meg cannot help but to blame Will.

"Someone must have gotten to her," she says as she paces Will's office.

"You know how the women are about lagging," Will reasons from behind the desk.

"Yes, I do, but she doesn't!"

Will is holding his hands out again, like he's expecting a physical fight.  Like she's some kind of wild animal he is trying to approach in earnest.  "But if Franky did scare her into smuggling the gear in—"

"She did," Meg snaps.

" _If_ she did," Will stresses, "then surely she or one of the others let her in on what would happen if she got caught."

Meg stops pacing.  "You act like it was over before it started!"

"You know we can't protect her, not completely," says Will.  "Do you want that on your conscience?"

"Conscience!" Meg throws up her hands.  "My god, do you just let them run the place, then?  Who's the governor here, Will, you or Franky?"

"Well, it isn't you, Meg," says Will sharply.

"What did you say to her, hm?" Meg challenges.  "To Smith?"

But Will is closed off, dead behind the eyes.  "That's not your concern, Meg."

Suddenly all the fire leaves her, and all the air in the room feels heavy.

"So just...just relax," Will continues, uncertainly, like he's already doubting his decision to snap at her.   
"And let me do my job."

Meg feels a thin, mirthless smile cross her features.  "Whatever you say," she says crisply, " _Governor_."

She isn't surprised when the alarm sounds.  She wouldn't go so far as to say that a riot was what she had hoped for, but building tension demands a release.  Franky is strong, charismatic and very good at manipulation, but Jacs Holt practically invented the game.  Franky is a wild card.  Jacs?  Well, Jacs never brought in crystal meth, at the very least.

And Will?  Well, Will just won't know how to handle a riot, will he?  A riot requires that a governor take a firm stance, and that is not something Will is known for.  He will falter, and it's no secret that Vera can't keep her shit together when she tries to make any kind of public statement, and then, finally, the governorship will fall to Meg, and Will can just give up his trash job to take care of the baby, and Meg can run this prison the way it's meant to be run, and everything will be as it should be.

Working in prisons is strange.  You see things that shouldn't be real, things that are beyond your perception of what is possible, or what a human person could do.

Meg hasn't been sleeping well recently, and at first, the sight of her husband, dead on the ground with a makeshift knife sticking out of his chest, seems like a particularly nasty nightmare.

It's her own fault, really.  She's been entertaining rather cruel thoughts about him because of this health kick he's been on, because he wants a family and wants to support her or whatever, and of course she doesn't really mean it, and she knows it's coming from a good place, and just because she doesn't think Will should be governor doesn't mean—it doesn't mean—

The world feels strangely quiet, like she's fallen underwater.  She locks eyes with Bea Smith, kneeling over her husband's body like she's tripped and fallen.

"Are you satisfied?" she hears herself say, as though from a distance.

She doesn't know whether the question is directed at Smith or at herself.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I have a lot of feelings, so I will try not to yell them all at you immediately. Lately I've felt that Wentworth has been doing considerable disservice to its inspiration. While I understand the reasoning behind killing Meg Jackson in the first episode, I wonder whether that decision didn't set a precedent for how other recognizable characters from Prisoner: Cell Block H were handled down the line, particularly with regards to who gets the juiciest plots.
> 
> This is an AU which will borrow heavily from PCBH, and which will follow a lot of canon events through s1-3, though many of them will be reassigned to different characters for narrative purposes. I'm not decided on ships yet, but any that appear with any degree of focus will be f/f.
> 
> Oh, and don't worry, the tall child (Joan) will be here soon. Thanks for checking in--I hope you enjoy!


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